[Brovashift]

Hi anyone and everyone,

Im just wondering why bbpress displays participants real name instead of their username by default? I want to change this as I can’t remember ever seeing a site before where you create a username for it not to be used, even this bbpress support forum shows usernames!

I see topics on this matter going back 4+ years, and still its the same solution, why?

So why is it that we have to edit code to achieve this? It should at least be a simple edit in the admin area.

[Pascal Casier]

Hi Brovashift,
Let’s see if we can add this as feature request in a next version or if there is any issue with this.
Pascal.

[Stephen Edgar]

bbPress uses the users username by default, a user can change their own profile to use first/last name if they wish via the “Display name” on the users edit profile screen.

[Robin W]

I’m about to add this feature to my style pack !

[Robin W]

@netweb On my test site it does firstname/lastname. Am I going mad?

[Stephen Edgar]

Did I get it backwards? I confused myself when testing this. :/

Can you test this with a new user please and create the appropriate ticket based on the results if needed 🙂

• When a new user is created they *only* have a username
• The user does *not* have a first and last name
• Once a user adds their first and last name the username is still used
• Now, if a user goes to their profile and *chooses* their display name to *use* their first and last name then that is that users *choice*

[Robin W]

@netweb

@brovashift

Ok I’ve done some testing.

bbpress uses the display_name as stored in wp_user table.

If you allow registration

ie – Dashboard>settings>membership – anyone can register

then yes, the user_nicename and the display_name in wp_user table are the same and the same as the username entered by the person registering.

If you don’t allow registration, and you add users manually

ie Dashboard>users>add new user

and you don’t enter the first and last name, then the user_nicename and display_name are the same

BUT if you enter the firstname and lastname, then the nice_name is the username, but the display_name is saved as firstname followed by lastname !

So a bit of inconsistency by WordPress.

Now display_name is all that we can play with in bbpress, and users can change their display_name under bbpress in the profile area.

So I plan to put a function in my style pack that will let the user choose what the default display_name is, and optionally disable users from creating a nickname and/or changing the default.

[Stephen Edgar]

Right, clear as mud then 😉 But this does sound like this is the expected behaviour 🙂

Trivia: bbPress.org theme here shows both @username and “Display Name” because people used to try and ping me via @Stephen Edgar, rather than @netweb, hence we added both to the template loops 🙂